Pizza!

Having made my very own home made vegeroni the only logical next step was to make pizza.  I have had some debacles with making my own dough in the past and ever since I saw Shelby use dough from Trader Joe's, it has been my go to pizza dough.  Someday I may perfect the art of making my own dough, but for now TJ's does an excellent job.

I bought two different doughs so I could make a non vegan pizza for my boyfriend and a vegan one for myself.  I decided to try out the garlic and herb dough for myself and compare the gluten stretchability to the whole wheat dough I would use for the BFs.

 

I have to say, I definitely like the gluten in the non whole wheat dough better.  I have a bit of an internal struggle when it comes to whole wheat in things like pizza dough.  Ideally I would eat everything "whole wheat" but when it comes to whole grains being healthier I really think that more applies to eating rice and barley and bulger and not so much flour.  I just don't really think flour is all that nutritious no matter which way you slice it unless you personally take a whole grain (rice, wheat, etc) and grind it up yourself.  And since I don't make pizza all that often, I don't feel so guilty using non whole wheat dough.  There, I said it.  

Flour type aside, this attempt at pizza making almost made me never want to make pizza again!  I have a sort of pizza stone and I try to use a cutting board as a pizza peel.  I sprinkled my cutting board with cornmeal and then assembled my boyfriend's pizza and tried to slide it onto the preheated stone.  This resulted in the pizza dough not wanting to budge but the toppings wanting to slide right off.  After trying every which way I could think of to get the pizza off the peel and onto the stone, I finally managed to get it to somewhat lift and slide resulting in some lost toppings and some flipped over crust.  Seriously, I considered not even making my pizza and never making pizza again.

It came out relatively well considering and I did decide to have a go at my own.  To save myself the trouble of trying to slide the pizza I decided to make it directly on the stone and not to preheat it.  This worked relatively well and restored my faith in my pizza making abilities.

In the end we had two not so aesthetically great but delicious pizzas.  Seriously, this vegeroni is incredible!

 

Sauce, mozzarella and vegeroni.

 
 

Spinach, sauce, vegeroni, kalamata olives and half topped with a sprout, bell pepper, tomato, carrot and radish salad I had.

After that I still had some vegeroni left so I decided to make pizza one more time last night to use it all up.  This time there were less disasters but still not pizza perfection.  I think I used too much sauce because my crust was a little soggy and not so crisp in the middle.  Still delicious and I had leftovers for lunch today and have more for tomorrow.